I grew up on a steady diet of nerdiness and the funk. One day I would throw down a mad serious chess game with a fellow 7 year-old punk, and the next I would annihilate suckas on Los Angeles’ heated soccer fields. Well, sometimes I’d get the beat down too (Pan Pacific got busy yall), but life was bloody and the juice had some ridiculous sweet sugar. I enjoyed its rough edges, and learned how to enjoy a cold orange slice only after sweating the kind of work that pushes you to exhaustion.
In my later years I’d geek out on fantasy computer games after finishing my homework and then head out near dawn to bomb the streets with fat markers and messy aerosol cans. I’d sleep on my never ending bus rides to school in the intergalactic reaches of LAUSD and then day dream in class. But I always studied. I studied Plato and math — connected it to Brand Nubian and Mos Def and Naomi Klein. I read the drug-induced insanities of Coleridge and the revolutionary jazz of Elgridge Cleaver and Nas’ street wise illuminations. I freestyled (poorly) about the poetics of money and the cosmic implications of herb smoke in backyard house parties bumping Project Blowed.
Los Angeles stole my mind, spit it out in a festering Melrose back alley, and I scraped it from the concrete like it was a stale piece of gum. We went to the Bay Area together to study life and knowledge and music some more, and I’ve been trying to repair a precious case of multiple personality schizophrenia ever since. Like trying to put together a broken steel lamp with ancient pottery pieces, unified reparations make no sense. But it’s that impossible quest which originates for me just a faint glimmer of creativity. Sometimes I write for my online writing collective at The Hydra Magazine, when I’m lucky I write for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and when the gods shine upon me I get scrilla for it. (Where hath the gods gone?) Also, I’m looking for venues that can handle my restless musical tastes, where hiphop, disco, and french pop all make sense together. But most happily, I help run the Sanguine Soul radio program, and you can hear me drop some tunes and wax cool calm and collected (right) every Saturday night on our labor of love. Chess anybody?
email: znote@sanguinesoul.com
*photo courtesy Jon Hung